Ten or fifteen years ago we rarely saw cigarettes in this country, their use being confined to the few natives who had acquired the habit during a residence abroad, and to foreigners, French, Italian, and Cuban settlers, who followed the practices of their youth. So slight was the general demand that, excepting in the large cities, cigarettes were rarely found for sale. To-day there are probably few small towns in the thickly settled portions of the country where cigarettes are not readily obtained; while in the large cities the stores vie with each other in giving us varied assortments of leading brands. Indeed, recent statistics state that nearly thirty per cent. of the entire smoking tobacco consumed in the United States is in this form. Cigarettes are now imported from all portions of Europe, but principally from France. Several factories have of late years been started in our own country, but the cigarette _par excellence_ is made in Havana. Nowhere else do we find capital so largely invested, labor so diversified, or such attention to details. There certainly you can take your choice--Honoradez, Havana, Astrea, Cherito, Henriquez, and dozens of others of lesser note. The tobacco used in the making of the Havana cigarettes is bought from the cigar factors, but only from those who have the most assured reputation. It consists of the leaves left from the making of cigars. The necessity of securing the best grades of tobacco cannot be overestimated. The judgment of the cigarette smoker is formed solely from the sense of taste. He is totally unaffected by sight, which in the cigar enables a clever workman to so roll bad tobacco that we are predisposed in favor of an inferior article. While absolute inferiority is intolerable in either, mediocrity, in Cuba at all events, is much more readily tolerated in the cigar than in the cigarette. The tobacco for the cigarette is not, as is generally supposed with us, raised on the plantations of the various leading cigar factors. "Bartegas," "Cobania," "Upman," or whatever be the name of our favorite brand, does not depend for its success upon any one plantation. The practice on the part of the leading houses is to send their purchasing agents into the tobacco district as soon as the crop begins to ripen. Sales are then and there arranged, immense sums sometimes being offered in advance, by way of retainer, for a specially likely plantation. The Vuelto Abago district is the favorite one, the planters there holding a position not unlike that occupied by the proprietors of the "Sea Island" plantations in days when "cotton was king." The ability to control the market so as to bring to their own manufactories the choicest tobacco is the main secret of the success of the larger houses, not, as is frequently supposed, any particular superiority in the workmen.